AT&T Outage Cuts Service To Wallingford, North Branford Customers

There seems to be a little of disagreement between AT&T and some of its customers over the scope of a service outage that occurred late last week.

An AT&T customer from Wallingford contacted the New Haven Register on Monday to complain that some of the company's customers in town and in neighboring North Branford had lost their phone, Internet and television services from company. The caller said all three services had been out since last Thursday.

An AT&T spokeswoman described the outage a "temporary" and said that it was only the UVerse television service that went down. Meaghan Wims, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement that only a small number of customers lost their service late Thursday.

"Technicians restored service early on Friday afternoon," Wims said. "We apologize for this inconvenience."

While acknowledging that a problem occurred, AT&T wasn't quite as forthcoming about the number of customers who lost service or the cause of the problem. Wims did not address the cause of the outage and said the company does not release customer numbers.

That's too bad because for the amount of money AT&T's customers pay for their service, they -or journalists working on their behalf -ought to be entitled to get some basic information about the length and scope of outages.